Evangelicals meet: Could be heaven for Mitt

The decision by a national group of evangelicals to hold a major meeting in predominantly Mormon Utah carries the potential for continued reconciliation between two constituencies that have viewed each other skeptically — and a political upside for Latter-day Saints presidential hopefuls like Mitt Romney.

The National Association of Evangelicals is holding its semiannual board meeting in Salt Lake City on Thursday — the first time the group has met in Utah. The association chose to gather in Utah precisely to open the door to improved relations between the religious groups.

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The board plans to meet with a Mormon leader, in what the evangelicals are framing as an opportunity for “dialogue” that will “deepen our understanding of the Mormon faith and contribute to the ongoing work of evangelicals in Utah.”

The gathering also has clear implications for 2012 presidential politics, with two leading Republican White House contenders still facing the prospect of influential Evangelical Christians in key early-voting states viewing them warily.

The tensions exploded in 2007 when Mike Huckabee was quoted in The New York Times saying of Romney: "Don't Mormons believe that Jesus and the devil are brothers?” Huckabee later apologized.

But concerns about his religion dogged Romney throughout 2008, and could hamper Jon Huntsman, who is also a Mormon, this time just the same.

Huckabee, an evangelical favorite who won the Iowa caucuses last time, was the clearest beneficiary of that dynamic. But continued political reconciliation between the two religious groups could help Huntsman and Romney — and at least partly close off an angle for Huckabee should he decide to run, experts told POLITICO.

“While [Mormon candidates] have been accepted in their own states, on the national level it looks like those barriers are beginning to come down,” said Brett O’Donnell, a Republican communications strategist who consults to faith-based groups and worked on John McCain’s 2008 campaign. “If those barriers were decreased, a Mormon candidate would probably do better in Iowa and South Carolina.”

Thursday’s meeting is just the latest step in a decades-long mending-of-fences between the two groups that began in the late 1970s and early 1980s with the Moral Majority, which brought together different religions under a banner of social conservative advocacy.

Mark DeMoss, an evangelical Republican strategist and longtime Romney adviser, said whatever suspicious existed of Mormon candidates are already fading with the passage of time.

“Time has enlightened a lot of evangelicals,” DeMoss said. “Nationally, Mitt Romney was virtually unknown in 2008, and now he’s better known. The question I often pose to evangelicals is not ‘Could you vote for a Mormon?’ but ‘could you vote for this Mormon?’”

The Rev. Greg Johnson, who founded the Standing Together Ministry in Salt Lake City, voiced hope that more dialogue between Mormons and evangelical Christians would continue to assuage tensions.

“That tension is real — I don’t want to understate it or under-acknowledge it,” Johnson told The Deseret News . “[The meeting] enables us to dialogue and communicate, build some relationships, begin some new interactions.”

DeMoss said candidates like Romney and Huntsman eventually will benefit from the natural political alliances between the groups.

“Evangelicals and Mormons have fundamental doctrinal differences in terms of their faith, but historically have been very compatible and even cooperative on various moral, social and political issues,” he said. “Politically, evangelicals have more in common with most Mormons than we do with liberal Southern Baptists” like Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton.

O’Donnell agreed that the suspicions are on the wane.

“In some parts of the country, there are still very deep theological beliefs about what it takes be qualified for president of the United States, and some people still do have an attachment to that stigma of the Church of Latter-day Saints,” he said. “Some of those folks will be very hard to convince. The question is how many of them still exist, and I think that number is very rapidly shrinking.”